The Travels of Eric and Lorna

We travelled to Manitou Springs , where we were staying for the weekend. Manitou Springs is a really cute little town just west of Colorado Springs, and is located at the foot of Pike's Peak .  We stayed at Avenue Bed and Breakfast . I cannot say enough nice things about this place. It was fantastic. L and I had the Manitou Suite, and it was great. The owners were nice, and are located on site if you need something, but they were also very adept at giving you your privacy when you wanted it. The room rates were quite reasonable I thought, considering we were in a tourist town at the height of summer, and includes a free breakfast. The breakfast is served every morning at 9 and was truly great. Even their coffee was good. I highly recommend this place if you are staying in Manitou Springs. They are located right on the main drag and you can walk everywhere in town. Fantastic place. We took a large part of the day to tour Garden of the Gods . This is a beautiful park located ...

We took a weekend trip to Colorado for L's birthday. Her sister and husband joined us. While the women went shopping we took a tour. Check out this cool street art. This is in the RiNo (River North) district in Denver, northeast of downtown. So great. Also saw some cool historic buildings. Here's a shot of downtown from the RiNo area. Overall mostly a travel day. After shopping and tours, we headed to Manitou Springs, our final destination. More on that in the next post.

Sorry for the long delay in putting these up. Since only two people read this, I don't have a great sense of urgency. Today was the actual day of our 25th wedding anniversary, so congratulations to us I guess.  Day 3 was mostly involved with traveling from Nashville, Tennessee to Asheville, North Carolina, for a stay at The Inn on Biltmore . After a tiring rainy drive, we arrived at the hotel and checked in. This is a swanky hotel located (obviously) on the Biltmore estate. This is not the Biltmore house itself, it's actually a couple miles away (It's a large property. You know, an estate. As in an estate by a Vanderbilt, not a 5 acre property called an estate). It is extremely nice, as you would expect given the location and price. This is the more expensive of the two hotels on the estate. In addition to staying there for three nights, we also had our anniversary dinner at The Dining Room, the nice restaurant there at the hotel. It was a fantastic meal, and ...

I really feel for the folks that had to walk from New Orleans to Nashville and on to Kentucky or wherever. Something close to 500 miles by road just from Natchez to Nashville. Even if you figure 20 miles per day (which is optimistic for a party on foot), that's still 25 days. Anyway, we started out on our drive. If you don't know, no commercial vehicles are allowed on the Trace, and the speed limit is 50 mph. It's pretty scenic throughout, even the parts you might not expect to be. The NPS has done an excellent job of preserving the viewshed of the Trace. We didn't stop a lot in the morning, since we had a lot of miles to cover. We first came to French Camp. This was a park that was said to be among the highest points in Mississippi. There was another segment of old trace. We then came to Bynum Mounds We also stopped at Pharr Mounds . And Bear Creek Mound . We then came to one of the most importan...